Regulation is driving up rents in the major cities of the Netherlands — and exacerbating the nation’s record housing shortage.
According to Pararius, a real-estate listings website, average rents have gone up 4 percent in Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam this year.
Rents rose 11 percent in Amsterdam last year.
Pararius’ Jasper de Groot blames the Dutch housing minister, Hugo de Jonge, who is bringing some 330,000 rental apartments into regulation. (more…)
So politicians understand how prices work after all.
Spain, Germany and the Netherlands are capping prices of electricity and heating for consumers. Energy providers are still paying high prices for oil and record prices for natural gas due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, so governments will make up the difference.
The price energy providers charge is based on their costs plus a profit. If they can’t pass higher costs on to consumers, they would either have to cut their own costs, for example by laying off staff; scale up, which isn’t easy in Europe’s heavily regulated energy market; or fail.
Somehow that logic is lost on many when it comes to housing. The same three countries have capped, or are capping, rents, but there is no compensation for landlords. Nor for developers, who can sell fewer rental apartments.
Landlords make up the difference by underinvesting in maintenance. Developments simply don’t happen.
Which are then used as arguments for even more regulation. (more…)
Regular readers may remember I wrote in May about Amsterdam’s plan to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists. At the time, Mayor Femke Halsema argued a ban would help reduce drug tourism.
Studies have since found it won’t, so the mayor has found a new argument: licensed cannabis retailers are linked to organized crime.
Cannabis expert Nicole Maalsté and I have written a joint op-ed in response for Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam. I’ll summarize our arguments here for non-Dutch readers.
Maalsté does research into medical marijuana at the University of Utrecht and runs the advisory Acces Interdit. (more…)
Child-care workers without a college education will have to give up their profession in Washington DC.
Regulations that were meant to go into effect in 2020, applying to all daycare centers and some home-based child-care businesses, were challenged by two child-care workers and a parent, but a federal court ruled for the district this week. Reason has the story.
The two workers, Altagracia Sanchez and Dale Sorcher, have 49 years of child-care experience between them. Both have Bachelor’s degrees — but not in early-childhood education, making them ineligible under DC’s new rules. (more…)
Experts and retailers caution against it, but the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is determined to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists.
In an op-ed for the NRC newspaper, I explain why it’s such a bad idea. Far from deterring the worst tourists, a ban would lead to more petty crime, more public consumption of weed and more nuisance to residents.
Here is a summary in English. (more…)
Berliners voted in September to expropriate apartments from large landlords. 56 percent supported the proposal in a referendum, which would put around 243,000 of the city’s 1.5 million rental apartments in public ownership.
I argued against expropriation at the time, and have written a follow-up for the Dutch opinion website Wynia’s Week in which I argue the city is unlikely to go through with it. It is a bad proposal, one that is opposed by even the center-left, and it may not stand up in court.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean either the city or the federal government is likely to ease Berlin’s housing shortage. (more…)
Spain’s ruling left-wing parties have agreed various measures to make housing more affordable, including a rent cap and higher property taxes.
The proposals are unlikely to be effected in areas ruled by conservatives, and they are right to block them. The pandemic has already made housing more affordable in Spain. The country doesn’t need the government to step in. (more…)
Housing is one of the top issues in the German election on Sunday. Proposals reveal a traditional left-right divide: the Social Democrats and Greens seek to rein in prices with rent controls; the Christian Democrats and liberal Free Democrats call for more construction, including by relaxing planning laws and other regulatory requirements.
Coinciding with the federal election, a referendum in Berlin will decide whether the city-state expropriates about 200,000 homes.
The proposal is for private landlords owning more than 3,000 properties to be “socialized”. Supporters argue this would lower prices, as the houses would no longer need to be profitable, but this betrays a simplistic understanding of the market. If the government makes it impossible for developers and landlords to turn a profit, they will develop and rent out fewer apartments and the housing shortage will grow, not shrink.
That’s exactly what happened when Berlin froze rents last year: the number of apartments on the market dropped 57 percent. Owners kept their flats empty while the Constitutional Court reviewed the new law. It ruled in April that the freeze was unlawful. Renters had to suddenly pay a year’s worth of missed rent increases.
Now left-wing parties want to try the same nationally. (more…)
Stefan Löfven may be Europe’s first prime minister brought down by a housing crisis, but he is unlikely to be the last.
Löfven, a social democrat, lost the support of the far left over a proposal to allow landlords to freely set rents for newly-built apartments.
Rents in Sweden are usually negotiated between landlords and tenants’ associations.
Other countries struggle to find the right balance between public and private in housing too. Berlin instituted a citywide rent freeze last year, but it was struck down as unconstitutional by Germany’s highest court. Spain’s central government is challenging a Catalan rent cap. Authorities in Barcelona want to extend a moratorium on evictions that has been in place since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But perhaps the best comparison is with the Netherlands, which organizes public housing in much the same way as Sweden. (more…)
Isabel Díaz Ayuso triumphed in Madrid’s regional election on Wednesday. The conservative People’s Party (PP) leader vanquished her erstwhile coalition partners, the liberal-nationalist Citizens, and fell just four seats short of an absolute majority.
The expectation is that the far-right Vox (Voice), with thirteen seats, will give Díaz Ayus a second term.
The combined left won 58 out of 136 seats in the regional assembly. (more…)
Spanish conservatives hope the third time will be the charm.
In 2018, spooked by the return of the far right, they chose the reactionary Pablo Casado as their leader over the center-right Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría. Casado pulled the People’s Party to the right, arguing for a clampdown on Catalan nationalism, lower immigration and tighter abortion laws. Voters didn’t approve. The party fell from 33 to 17 percent support in the election and lost over half its seats in Congress.
In the next election, seven months later, Casado doubled down. He refused to attack far-right leader Santiago Abascal and proposed to criminalize Catalan separatism. The conservatives did better, going up to 21 percent, but they still failed to defeat the Socialists. Abascal’s Vox also increased its vote share, to 15 percent.
The lesson from other European countries is that center-right parties can never outbid the far right, which is always willing to go a step further. Moving to the right in order to shrink the distance between mainstream and far right isn’t a winning strategy either. It makes it easier for conservative voters to switch.
In Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso is nevertheless attempting the same strategy — and she might win. (more…)
Asked about riots in America’s major cities, Kellyanne Conway, President Donald Trump’s outgoing political advisor, told Fox News:
These are Democratically-led cities and most with Democratic governors. It’s not Donald Trump’s watch.
(That didn’t stop Trump from deploying federal troops to Portland over the objections of the city’s Democratic mayor and Oregon’s Democratic governor in June.)
The suggestion that the president isn’t responsible for the whole country, but only to those parts that are loyal to him, is outrageous.
But it is how Trump has governed. (more…)
With the Brexit transition period ending in just four months, concern is rising that the United Kingdom might crash out of the EU’s common market and customs regime without a deal.
Not everyone is worried. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, argued it “wouldn’t be the end of the world” if Britain left without a deal. Right-wing economists are looking forward to setting “attractive tax rates” once the United Kingdom is free of the EU’s grasp. The UK, they believe, could become a “Singapore-on-Thames”, gain a “competitive advantage” over the EU and draw businesses and investment away from continental Europe.
That is unlikely. (more…)
Tourism in Spain has come virtually to a standstill as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
For many residents of Barcelona, Spain’s top tourist destination, it is a relief.
The city welcomed 9.5 million tourists last year, up from under two million in the 1990s. That’s almost six times its population (1.6 million).
Most come during the summer, when I normally avoid the old medieval city and Barceloneta beach. (The beaches north of the Olympic Harbor, which were created for the 1992 Olympics, are usually less crowded but still busy.)
Now Barceloneta is actually nice. Cops constantly check to make sure sunbathers keep two meters distance, so crowding is impossible. The xiringuitos (tapas bars on the beach) have free tables. La Rambla, which is otherwise so packed it’s impossible to get through, is now pleasant for a stroll. (more…)
I haven’t blogged much recently. What little news there is other than the coronavirus outbreak seems rather less important. Since I’m by no means an expert on pandemics, I don’t have a lot to write.
I can tell you what’s happening here in Barcelona. (more…)
